In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).

Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).

Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.

In case you’re looking for something more white collar, I have found working for government prime contractors to be a sweet spot. I know, it feels gross to work for “the man” or to be the ones taking in those tax dollars, but hear me out.

The work is well defined, they are very often unionized, even the office staff, and it’s essentially guaranteed employment as long as you want to work there. I’ve also found that putting in what I consider pretty normal levels of effort is highly rewarded because often the bar is pretty low by those that have been in the various companies for decades that no longer care. As long as you guard against professional apathy and keep driving yourself to do the best you can, it’s can be a great sector to work in.

I would suggest looking for ones you don’t already know the names of though (often small subsidiaries of the larger companies are fine). Battelle for instance operates almost all of the DoE national labs and I hear from colleagues they are a good company with labs all over the country that need scientists, engineers, accountants, IT pros, facility folks, etc.

That indeed looks like exactly what they are, which I should have known since I have a bunch of UniFi gear at home. I wonder what PennDOT is using them for.

These are small cell antennas, generally used for mmWave 5G due to the poor penetration the high frequency signals have or to increase capacity of a network where a lot of devices are used in a small space (places like stadiums, airports, city centers, etc) in which case they may have LTE antennas as well. They usually cover about a city blocks worth of area so you’ll see them spaced much like you describe.

The box on the ground is the actual radio and power supplies with the antennas behind the shroud on the pole. You’ll sometimes also see the radio cabinet mounted about 1.5m up the pole so it’s off the ground.

Source: a company I used to work for installed these (Crown Castle).

Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.

I would recommend prowlarr instead of jackett for indexer management, and pihole as at least an additional blocking service but in reality it’s really all you need for use at home. I’d also strongly encourage use of a VPN on your *arr download services. I use a separate box to run Plex and then have my *arrs all running on their own VM inside if it to provide separation and allow be to more easily segregate the network traffic (as someone that doesn’t really know docker that well it “just works” for me. Also probably worth looking at how to store your media on an external target, it’s easy to quickly accumulate 10s of TBs of media and trying to store that all on the server locally is asking for trouble. Better to set everything up on a NAS to start.

Asking broadly like this is akin to asking for a guide on how to cook, it’s generally too broad for there to be a single guide. You first need to figure out what your goals are (you state one already, you’d like it to be externally accessible), determine what services you want to host, and then start looking at how to do so.

The advice I’d give is to start with a solid base, you’ll need something to self host on and it really shouldn’t be the PC you use for other things. Get it setup to run a virtualization OS such as proxmox and use that as your starting point. Then do a lot of reading. I spend probably three to four times as much time reading about the service I’m planning to deploy compared to actually doing the work to deploy it. Lastly, plan. You should have a solid plan in the beginning of how you want your service to work (what will be external vice internal only, how will you setup the networking stack to do that, are you going to have a domain, and will you use subdomains or folders to divide services, what does your IP space look like, will you host your own firewall to make the networking more controlled or fight with your ISPs router, do you want to use docker, kubernetes, or maybe full VMs for each service, do you want/need a UI to manage things from or are you comfortable with CLI, etc). These answers will lead you to guides for various services as well as service specific forums where help is more focused.

I use protonmail with their family plan, it’s not terribly priced when you consider it comes with calendar, vpn, and drive storage as well. The biggest annoyance is probably that you have to use their mobile apps due to the encryption and they are not the greatest, but it does encrypt everything which I find outweighs the forced use of just their app.

I care less about the temperature usually and more about the fizz. Colder liquids can dissolve more CO2 so I usually drink colder soda because it’s fizzier.

Curious about the ears you have on your 8 port POE switch; I’d love to rack mount mine and get it off my “other stuff” shelf. Are they from UI? Or did you repurpose some from something else?

Food theory covered this in terms of Christmas trees. The answer is yes, mostly, with a lot of caveats, and also probably not really.

So you never apply patches or updates, that seems like an odd thing to be proud of but different strokes for different folks I guess.

Backblaze B2. Any software that is S3 compatible can use B2 as the target and it’s reasonably priced for the service. I backup all the PCs and services to a Synology NAS and then backup that to B2 (everything except my Plex media, that would be pricy and it’s easy enough to re-rip from disc if needed).

The problem I have is there is no way to playback live tv on AppleTV which is what we use throughout our home. Plex just works and has wife approved first party apps for pretty much everything.

This is pretty much it, Plex offers far more client apps that are full featured and they make it super easy to setup and use both as an admin and a user. Especially for things like OTA TV where they provide the guide data once it’s setup (which is why it’s a paid option). I’d move to JellyFin in a heartbeat if they’d support OTA and DVR playback on AppleTV.

I also have a decent amount of video data for Plex (not nearly 50TB, but more than I want I pay to backup). I figure if worst comes to worst I can rip DVD/BluRays again (though I’d rather not) so I only backup file storage from my NAS that my laptops and desktop backup to. It’s just not worth the cost to backup data that’s fairly easy to replace.

I also recommend B2, it’s an S3 compatible service so any backup software/scripts/plugins that work with S3 should work with Backblaze.

No, not by a long shot. They suffer the Linux problem because they are built and maintained by groups with narrow, specific, principled goals. Like Linux, fedi-services offer at best a 95% solution for the average user, and introduce a fair bit of friction to general usability. For some people that’s not a problem, they are willing to jump through some usability hoops because they find value in the concepts of decentralization and federated services. But most users just want to shitpost, troll, collect karma, and be with their friends. That place for better or worse is still mainstream services and it likely will be for as long as they exist.

Linux suffers from “works for me”, and “I don’t need that feature” by a lot of developers and maintainers of various distros. We already see that from Lemmy with the dev being clear that he isn’t going to be working on anything but bug fixes and if you want a feature then you have to build it yourself. But even worse was the removal of captchas in 0.18.0 and it took a fair bit of back and forth with the admins of various large instances pointing out that captchas, while not perfect, are really the only thing holding back giant waves of bot signups.

So while lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. may work fine for the devs and 10%ers, for the masses it’s just too much friction when Reddit, twitter, etc still exist and they aren’t principled in the same ways such that they will put up with the inconveniences for a solution that only meets most of their needs when one that meets all their needs and has none of those inconveniences works fine still.

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If jellyfin could record and playback OTA TV on my Apple TV I’d switch tomorrow, but it seems the team is either unable to or unwilling to work on that feature which is core to how my household uses Plex. The only maybe solution is Infuse which is paid and closed source so is no better really than using Plex in that regard.

Like most things in the world, your use case is not the only use case and as such a solution that checks all the boxes for you will not check all the boxes for everyone.